Offline Use March 2012?

[GrantGlaus]

A number of presentations on the esri.com website indicate offline functionality would be included by March of 2012.  It appears this has not happened. Has there been any update on when that might be available?

I know caches are available now and have done that.  I'm looking for even the basic ability to search data points, for example a utility worker searching for a customer's name or location and see relevant fields associated with that data point.  As an electric utility, we have large areas of territory with no coverage and without this basic ability the maps aren't much use.  Also, with all of the tablet options now that are wifi only, it only makes sense to be able to display and search a feature layer that is located on the device.  As it stands now, it seems that without a live connection to the server we no longer have a GIS app, only a map.

[DanO_Neill]

We will be introducing full support for offline capabilities in the Spring release of the ArcGIS Android SDK which is expected around March 2013.  There are ways to work with offline features in our current release of the SDK.  The Create Local JSON Feature sample shows how you can persist features to device local storage and use a local tile package for your area of interest.  Take a look at our offline wind turbine inspector, formally Bladerunner, app to see more advanced workflows.

[GrantGlaus]

Glad to hear it.  We will probably wait until then to really investigate using Android tablets to deploy our GIS to the field.